


Crossing the Divide (to the land of the living)

by Telaryn



Series: The Hero and The Bad Boy [22]
Category: Leverage, Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Banter, Battle, Confessions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Head Injury, Love Confessions, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 12:53:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/867760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Hawkeye is injured in battle and captured by an old enemy, Coulson makes the decision to finally reveal himself to a limited number of people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crossing the Divide (to the land of the living)

**Author's Note:**

> In case you missed it? Part 20 was the last time Clint and Quinn will be truly happy for a very, very long time. I apologize in advance.

It was the fourth Avengers mission he’d been allowed to monitor since his heart attack, and Phil Coulson was finally starting to chafe under the restriction Director Fury had set in place. _”You are gathering data for analysis. That’s it. You don’t talk to anyone in the transport beyond what you absolutely have to say.”_ His time lurking in the shadows was coming to an end – he’d been seen in the field enough times now that Hill and Fury were talking about designating a clearance level more specific than “not you” to let people know he was alive.

The problem wasn’t letting people know he was alive; the problem was what happened to his world once they did.

_”Dammit Stark, what do you mean he’s not up there? Hawkeye, report!”_

The problem was Clint Francis Barton, former SHIELD operative, current Avenger, and – if the slightly panicked edge to Captain America’s voice could be considered a reliable indicator – currently missing in action. Fingers dancing across the keyboard in front of him, Coulson called up the footage their transport had been taking of the battle; scrolling it to the last point he remembered hearing Hawkeye calling out enemy activity to his teammates.

 _There you are._ Clint had made his nest on top of a bank building – not the tallest structure in the area by a long shot, but high enough to give him the perspective the Avengers would need to do their jobs as quickly and efficiently as possible. _”Watch yourself Cap – three closing in at nine o’clock.”_ Coulson remembered that point in the battle – he’d been distracted watching Iron Man and Black Widow debut a new fighting style they seemed to have developed by watching too many Three Stooges marathons.

Less than a minute later by the time stamp there was the sharp crack of an explosion, and the roof-top Clint had been occupying was swallowed in a cloud of dust and flying debris. Heart suddenly pounding much too fast, Coulson forced himself to continue watching until the scene cleared. _And who the hell are you three?_ he asked himself as three black-clad figures arrived on the rooftop – lifting an unconscious Hawkeye and carrying him off.

Zooming the camera in as tight as the technology would allow, Coulson focused his attention on the one newcomer that appeared to be in charge. The man’s face was older, but definitely tugged at his memory.

 _Santiago. You son of a bitch, what demon did you deal with to keep yourself breathing?_ Santiago Almeda had been a follower of Jacques Duquesne – the Swordsman. His presence meant that whatever else might be going on, Clint had been targeted. _He’s unconscious._ Assuming he was still alive, and until Coulson had reason to assume otherwise he was clinging fast to the idea that Barton was still breathing, a concussion was the best they could hope for.

Pausing the playback, he listened for a moment to the chatter going on around him and in the field. The Avengers were already trying to track Clint down using his field communicator. The SHIELD agents around him were analyzing casualty numbers and starting to assess what it was going to take to deal with civilian survivors. _They know what they’re doing. It’s their job, and they’re perfectly qualified to do it._

 _They don’t know about Santiago’s involvement._ The personal angle pushed this into an entirely different direction; not only was the danger even greater for Clint than if it had been a stranger, Barton still had deep, involuntary reactions to anything involving his former mentor. The idea of Clint regaining consciousness in the hands of somebody like Santiago Almeda made Coulson’s blood run cold.

Settling back in his chair, Coulson turned to look around the command chamber. Intellectually he understood that everything was running as it should – at peak efficiency even. Everyone was doing their job precisely the way it should be done.

He got to his feet. _You knew it was only a matter of time._ This entire charade had been about Clint and Coulson’s feelings for the archer. Director Fury had left how he went about revealing himself largely up to Coulson’s judgment. If he was finally ready to break his cover, what better reason than making sure his former asset came through a difficult time in as close to one piece as he could manage?

“Who is your top qualified person on the communicators the Avengers use?” He addressed the question to the AIC – a woman he hadn’t personally trained, but who had already impressed him with her level head.

The AIC glanced to her right. A young man who looked barely out of his own training got to his feet. 

“Hawkeye will still have his ear piece in place if they are tracking him,” Coulson said, fixing his attention on the communications expert. “Find the unit and I want you to remotely reprogram it to receive on channel X32.” Without waiting for an acknowledgement, he turned his attention to the rest of the assembled company. “Anyone holding a Level Seven clearance or higher may stay. Everyone else needs to vacate this room immediately.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and waited. The decision was a calculated one – it left him with the Agent in Charge and two specialists. The tech he’d tasked with reprogramming Clint’s communicator looked confused. “Patch me into the frequency, and then you’re dismissed,” he told the man crisply.

His own ear piece filled with the sound of distant conversation and somebody being dragged along. “What you are about to hear goes no further than these four walls,” he said, addressing the remaining agents. “You will also each be debriefed personally by Agent Hill upon our return to headquarters.” He glanced at the AIC. “Inform Captain Rogers that Hawkeye was taken prisoner by Santiago Almeda, and the situation is more serious than he likely suspects. Inform him also that Santiago Almeda is a known associate of one Jacque Duquesne, aka the Swordsman.”

The woman nodded. “Yes sir, Agent Coulson.” The address sounded strange, but with each passing moment Coulson was more secure in his decision. Barton needed to be contacted and he needed to be brought up to speed. If Phil Coulson really was ready to return to the land of the living, he couldn’t think of a better reason.

Nick was going to kill him all over again when he found out.  
******************  
 _”Barton, report.”_

The voice in his head was calm and steadying, but the second Clint tried to open his eyes, pain exploded in his skull. Unable to keep from crying out, he slowly curled into a fetal position, hands clamped on either side of his head. “Dammit,” he breathed, trying to ride out the rush of agony.

_”Probable concussion; it looks like Santiago managed to blow most of the parapet up into your face.”_

Memory began returning in flashes, helped along by what he was hearing. “Did you say Santiago?” Clint asked, finally managing to get his legs under him and push himself into a sitting position.

_“Santiago Almeda, lieutenant to one Jacques Duquesne – yes, so we have to assume you were being targeted specifically. The team is en route to extract you.”_

Clint was already studying his surroundings, knowing that he would be expected to provide as much detail as he could once Coulson remembered he’d…

He’d already rolled smoothly to his knees and was about to get to his feet, when his brain caught up with what was going on and filed its protest…in triplicate. “Coulson?”

_“Focus, Barton. Where are you? What do you see?”_

“Uh…” He had two choices – he could deal with the fact that he was hearing dead people, or he could follow orders. “Not much,” he said finally, exhaling sharply and getting to his feet. “How serious is Santiago, do you think?”

_”By my calculations we’re looking at a couple million in property damage, civilians injured, not to mention he blew up a parapet in your face…”_

“So, a lot serious,” Clint said, going to the only door he could see and checking it for weaknesses. “Good to know.” _Action._ He needed action – needed to do something proactive. “I might be able to pick this,” he continued, crouching to check the lock. “Looks like a basic five-pin system.” He squinted to get a better look, and was rewarded with a fresh stab of pain through his skull. “Dammit,” he hissed, ducking his head and trying to get himself under control. “Coulson, I…I might be really fucked here.”

 _”Keep it together Barton. The team has been apprised of your location – they’re en route. I’ve only got three heat signatures in the building, two of them guarding you, one looks as though he’s guarding the exterior.”_ There was a short pause. _”I’m more concerned about that head injury.”_

Clint straightened up, stretching as much as he could to ease his abused muscles. “Do you know how long I was out?”

_”I’m embarrassed to say no one had eyes on you when you were taken, but if the footage is any indication longer than I’m comfortable with. You know you’re going to have to stay awake until you can be cleared by a doctor.”_

“I remember the drill,” Clint said, chuckling ruefully. “So – want to keep me company until the cavalry gets here?” Silence followed the question, and he felt his heart twist painfully in his chest. “Come on, sir,” he wheedled, his eyes already aching with the threat of tears. “You’re already reaching out from the great beyond…what’s another hour indulging your favorite pain in the ass going to cost anyone?”

 _”It probably won’t be that long.”_ Clint felt some of his tension immediately ease on hearing the answer. No matter how whacked out this set-up was, it felt as real as anything he’d known since Loki had touched his heart and destroyed his life. If he was going to be spending the time waiting anyway, it wasn’t as though he _had_ to tell anyone he’d spent it talking to a dead man.

 _”If we’re going to do this,”_ Coulson went on, _”then I want you up and walking. I’m not going to risk putting you to sleep with my ramblings.”_

Hugging his arms across his chest, Clint nevertheless laughed quietly. “You think I’m going to fall asleep in the middle of talking to you, you’re crazy.” He dutifully began a slow, shuffling walk from one end of the room to the other. “All right boss – I’m walkin’ here. Now tell me what you’ve been up to.”

_”You first. I’ve been keeping track of what you’ve been up to as best I can, and I suspect you have a lot of things you’d like to get off your chest.”_

_Okay, that’s not fair,_ Clint whined inwardly. _If I’m going to have a delusion this profound, does it immediately have to guilt-trip me?_ “You want to talk about Quinn,” he sighed at last.

_”Your love life is the proverbial eight hundred pound gorilla in the room.”_

Clint walked the length of the room twice before he could figure out how to respond. Finally he asked, “What do you know?”

 _”Assume I know everything a report can tell me,”_ was the answer. _”What I’d like to hear is why?_

Trying to take his mind off the throbbing in his skull, Clint nevertheless was able to smile. “Ah, you want to know what my doctor knows.”

 _”I want to know what’s going on inside your heart…Clint.”_ The small hesitation, as though Coulson had been resisting the urge to use his given name, was like a hammer-punch to Clint’s chest. _”You’ve made some impulsive moves in the past, but this seems a little on the extreme side even for you.”_

“Nobody has ever looked at me like he does,” Clint said. “I look into his eyes and I know exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

_”With a man who took a contract out on you that would have left you crippled for life?”_

He’d been prepared for the challenge, but hearing it stated so bluntly in Coulson’s voice still hurt. “Is it worth explaining how gross an oversimplification that is? Or how far we’ve come from that point?”

_”Did he really leave that life behind?”_

“He did,” Clint answered without hesitation. “He works for Stark now, and he really likes it. He’s good at it too, from what Tony tells me. Even before that, he’d started doing some independent contract work helping me and Nat out with different assignments.” He sighed, feeling old frustrations crowding into his already over-full, over-taxed brain. “He’s not that man anymore, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

_”I know the others support the relationship.”_

“Then if you can’t trust me, trust the Captain,” Clint countered. “Steve likes Quinn, and he likes me being together with Quinn.” Which hadn’t always been the case, but since he was arguing with a hallucination anyway, Clint figured he was on solid ground shading the truth somewhat.

_”I do trust you Clint, but even you have to admit you don’t have the greatest track record when it comes to things like this.”_

“He loves me, Phil.” Clint had to force himself to continue moving, even as his stomach did a slow, queasy roll in his gut. “I love him. We’re good together.”

There was a moment of painful silence, where the only things he was aware of was the hiss of his boots against the dusty concrete floor, and the agonized throbbing in his head. Then, _“I don’t see much basis for that except your need to believe it. He’s brutalized you, manipulated you, and managed to separate you from the one thing that you always said kept you straight and gave you purpose.”_

 _SHIELD_. “That was my decision,” Clint argued. “He never pressured me one way or the other. Hell, I didn’t want to choose but Fury forced the issue.”

The voice in his head softened – the patient, indulgent tone he’d heard from Coulson so often over the years they’d spent together. _“Did you expect anything else? I know what you hoped for Clint, but if we’re being honest you couldn’t have expected him to allow the relationship to continue.”_

“I know,” Clint said. “That’s why I left. Besides, nothing was the same anymore.” His voice trailed off, and he drew a deep breath to steady himself; realizing as he did that the pain in his skull seemed to be growing worse instead of better. “Loki ruined things for me. Nobody was ever going to trust me again after that or want to work with me.”

_”Shelley did.”_

Clint realized in that moment that he truly was one of the more masochistic people on the planet. _Why would I torture myself with memories of that clusterfuck?_ Nothing about that mission – the first where he’d been the independent contractor backing up one of his more fondly remembered pre-Natasha SHIELD partners – had ended well for anyone.

“Fury put him up to it to try and separate me from Quinn – bring me back into the family.”

_”And would that have been so bad?”_

“You wouldn’t ask that question if you could see us together,” he said, pressing a hand to his forehead as he walked to try and counter the slow, building tide of pain. “You’d know. It’s better than I ever imagined being in love could be. I’m building a home, a life, with somebody who sees what a mess I am and loves me anyway. You of all people know how much the odds were always going to be against me finding that.”

There was another long moment of silence. _“I would have given you that and more. You’re not a mess, Barton – for some reason I’ve never been able to figure out, you just need people not to expect too much from you.”_

It took every ounce of self-control he could muster for Clint to keep from putting his fist into the cinderblock wall. “You don’t know,” he gasped, his vision blurring with tears. “God, Phil – you have no idea what it’s been like for me since you…” He laughed weakly, realizing that he still retained enough of his faculties that he literally couldn’t say the word – couldn’t acknowledge that he was carrying on a conversation with a dead man.

 _“Any nausea?”_ The quiet concern in Coulson’s voice rocked Clint to his soul. He swiped angrily at the tears that fell down his cheeks with the back of one hand.

“Not much,” he said quietly, swallowing hard against a lump in his throat. _What the hell are you doing this for? Sacrificing your sanity bit by bit in the hopes that they’ll find you before Santiago decides to start taking his revenge?_

_“Are you lying to me?”_

Clint smiled, but the gesture hurt. It all hurt – everything hurt – but he couldn’t just quit. Even before he had somebody who would expect him home in one piece he’d never known when to lay down and die. “Maybe a little bit,” he admitted finally. _Coulson always expected you home in one piece._ The man had moved heaven on earth on more than one occasion to make sure he was able to walk away from a situation that should have killed him.

 _“Keep it together,”_ Coulson said. _“The team’s close – eta twenty minutes at most.”_ There was a small pause. _“Can you do that for me?”_

 _I could do anything for you._ The thought came to him unbidden, as natural a response to the situation as his breathing or his heartbeat, but Clint knew he couldn’t risk saying the words out loud. It was too much truth, enough to shatter him into so many pieces he would never find his way back. So instead he said one of the million or so other things he’d always regretted never getting to say to his former handler. “I’ve missed you.”

The response at first was crisp and professional. _“You’ve stopped moving – I can tell.”_ When Clint grudgingly resumed his pacing, however, Coulson said more gently, _“I’ve missed you too.”_

Silence stretched between them again, more comfortable this time – less desperate. _If this is what it’s like to go crazy,_ Clint thought, I think I could get used to it. “I know the Quinn thing looks weird,” he said after another pass. “And I wish I could explain it so you would understand that this really isn’t like those other times.”

_”I just want you to be happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. It doesn’t have to make sense – God knows you and I wouldn’t have made any sense at all.”_

In spite of himself, Clint smiled at that. _Too true._ “What would you have done if we’d had the chance to follow up on New Mexico like we’d planned?” It wasn’t until he asked the question that Clint realized how much not knowing the answer had been eating at him.

 _“Clint…”_ He could hear the reluctance in Coulson’s voice, but now that he’d put it on the table, Clint knew he wasn’t going to back off until his former handler told him _something_.

“Oh come on,” he begged, turning at the wall and picking up his pace slightly. “Think of it as the closure I never thought I’d get.”

He imagined he could hear a hum of frustration, and the idea made him feel almost giddy. _“You would have hated it, but we would have talked it through first. All of it – pros, cons, the effect on your career…I meant what I said at the time.”_

Clint had never doubted that he was completely serious about that part. “You had to be sure you wanted to risk getting involved with someone like me – I get that. Didn’t really expect anything different.”

What he was completely unprepared for was the unguarded surprise in Coulson’s response. _“That wasn’t it at all, Clint. I needed to be sure you understood what you were risking by getting involved with someone like me.”_

“Someone like..?” Clint almost laughed out loud, but had to stop and brace himself against the nearest wall until the wave of nausea threatening to drag him under passed. “You were perfect, sir. Everything I could have ever hoped for.”

 _”If I didn’t know you so well, I’d say that was the concussion talking.”_ Whatever was going on inside his head, Clint couldn’t help being impressed by the quality of his hallucination. Coulson sounded almost self-consciously embarrassed, and it was as weirdly adorable as he’d always imagined it would be.

Noise from outside his cell disrupted whatever either of them was going to say next. _”I show the team being on site,”_ Coulson confirmed. “They should have you in hand in moments.”

Clint pressed his ear to the door. “Less, if what I’m hearing is any indication.” He froze, closing his eyes against the realization of what was coming next. “This is it, isn’t it? They’re going to take me to the doctor and fix whatever’s broken so I won’t be able to talk to you again.”

_”Clint, I’m sorry.”_

_Wow,_ Clint thought, stepping back from the door as the sounds of a very angry Natasha grew steadily louder on the other side. _I really am going crazy._ “Sir, I know you’re just a hallucination, but you have to know you have nothing to apologize to me for. Ever. It’s me who should be apologizing to you. If I’d been stronger…”

_”Clint, enough. What happened isn’t on you, and you’re not doing anyone any favors at all by continuing to act like it is. Let it go. For me, if you can’t do it for yourself.”_

Clint drew in a deep, shuddering breath as the first blow landed on the door to his cell. “I love you, Phil Coulson. Always have, always will.”  
******************  
 _I love you too._ Coulson felt the words as deeply as he’d ever felt anything in his life, but his damnable sense of propriety and awareness of the few SHIELD personnel that had been witness to everything he’d said so far kept him from being able to say his answer out loud. “Open a line to HQ,” he said calmly, looking to the on-site AIC. “Director Fury’s ears only; Priority One.”

He could tell by the woman’s expression that she was still trying to process the reality of who was giving her orders, but mercifully she didn’t question him. “I have Director Fury on the line, Agent Coulson.”

Exhaling softly, he nodded an acknowledgement before turning his attention to the voice in his ear. _”I take it we can finally welcome you back to the living then?”_ Nick asked drily.

“We need to start the process, yes. Clearance levels, notifications…”

_”Barton’s impending visit to HQ?”_

Thinking of the conversation he’d just finished, Coulson couldn’t deny the truth of what his old friend was saying. “He doesn’t fully understand what’s happening yet, but yes – time is definitely running out on that score.”


End file.
